National galleries are making use of the Internet to reveal their hidden treasures. Tate Britain only has room for about a third of its collection to go on display. The rest can be found in their underground vaults. But in a plan to make the whole collection more accessible, staff are scanning these hidden works onto computer and making their images available on the Internet.

Oliver Vicars-Harris is in charge of the Tate Insight project and hopes to make 50,000 images available in just 18 months. The works are being catalogued to help visitors search through the collection, and the archivists are also adding a facility to explore the collection by broad subject areas, not only by the artist's name and work title.

The aim of this project is to break down some of the barriers between the gallery and the public and allow people to ask questions at their own pace in their own home. We caught up with Oliver to find out how the project has progressed...